I want to try to set up an ESP8266 (using the Arduino IDE) to occasionally connect to a wifi SSID to send telemetry back. I also would really like to be able to have it running a softAP for configuration/settings purposes. (i.e. so if you want to change internal settings in your code, you can connect directly to the device to access a web form to do so)
The problem is, I am not 100% sure how I know which is which when making an outgoing telemetry json query. I want it to go out on the STATION mode connection. Presumably in most cases the AP mode won't be connected, but there may be rare instances where both are connected at the same time. Thus how do I tell the device to specifically use the STA side of things when it needs to send data back over the internet?
I can't even seem to find any specific examples to ask if one or the other is connected. (you can poll WiFi.status() but - which one is it reporting?)
Any help is appreciated
Related
I want to send data(I think I can achieve it sending http requests) between two ESP's that are connected to the same LAN. I don't want to use one as an access point! I have one esp that is acting as a homekit device, and I want to send data(for example, sensor readings) to it from another esp. I've seen many tutorials where one device is acting as an access point, but that's not what I need. I also don't really need to access the esp data directly from my laptop, so I believe I don't need the html page. I would appreciate any help, code, or any existing tutorials, because I didn't find a single one.
Configuring one ESP as an AP is only done for convenience. You can configure both of them in STA (station) mode and they will connect to, e.g. your phone hotspot or your wifi router.
Connected to the same hotspot, they are on the same network, and they will be able to communicate with each other (unless the hotspot is configured to not allow this ... ). The tricky part will most likely be for the "client" to determine the IP address of the "server" in order to create the connection.
If you have admin access to the hotspot, you can cheat and hard code the IP addresses (assuming that the hotspot will assign the same IP address to the device the next time it sees it.)
It's also not difficult to use mdns (aka bonjour), which allows a network device to assign itself a local hostname. So you can name one ESP ("myserver") which allows the ESP running the client code to connect to "http://myserver.local"
So I have an ESP device that is connected to my WiFi network. It runs a web server and now I want to make requests to this webserver from my android app. So I tried a couple of things and none got satisfied.
Things I tried and why not suitable for me.
Setting up mDNS:
Can't use it since android doesn't really do mDNS it fails in the lookup.
Setting a Static IP:
This approach will fail if the routers' gateway is changed. (at least that's what I believe).
(Can anyone elaborate on this ^. AFAIK if you want to make a static IP you need to match the given gateway with your router's gateway, So if I configured esp board for my router, it might not work with someone else's router.)
Setting a WebSocket connection:
To do this also need the hostname which is IP again.
Asking IP from user:
Since this is going to be a product I can't ask the user to provide the IP address in the mobile application. It leads to a lack of user experience.
I still hope that there should be another way of handling this case which I'm not aware of. I'm actually dying to get this done and I need you guys to help me with this.
It sounds like you are over complicating stuff here.
Step 1. Connect esp board to your wifi (i guess you have figured this out)
step 2. check what lan address your board has connected to, for this is usually just use
Serial.print("IP address: ");
Serial.println(WiFi.localIP());
step 3. start your wifiserver at port 80
WiFiServer(80);
step 4. in your android app, or any other platform(i recommend using browser in computer while simply testing if it works or not) type url: local_ip_address_that_you_got_above/mygetrequest?value1=1
step 5. Listen for incoming clients and intercept the get value that you will recieve in the header in fashion of "GET /mygetrequest?value1=1"
step 6. done :)
If you want to skip the process of implementing all of it from scratch you can get full source code of my example server described above at: https://spacerival.com/lounge/2614/arduino-server but i do highly suggest you to implement it on your own and not just copy paste that source code, since you wont learn much at all to be fair
So after trying all day long, I came with a solution. This is a bit of a workaround as I was lost. So What I did was I created a Soft AP with a small web server that returns the LocalIP. So my esp is working on both AP and STA modes right now.
How it works is simple
ESP runs with a small webserver with /getLocalIP endpoint.
ESP opens a SoftAP for the user to connect. The user connects with the
SoftAP.
The user will be asked to enter credentials for the desired
WiFi.
After connecting to the desired WiFi mobile app will request a
for 192.168.4.1/getLocalIP (AP's IP Address).
Since ESP is already connected to the WiFi this endpoint will send the WiFi.localIP() to the app.
So now the app has the LocalIP.
I've done a lot of searching but have yet to find any examples of the data format for accessing a simple BLE characteristic. I have a CC41 (HM-10 clone) that I have set to master mode and successfully connected to a BLE server device using a PC terminal program and the AT commands. I now want to send the proper data to access a service such as Immediate Alert (0x1802) and it's Alert Level characteristic (0x2A06). I know the full service and characteristic UUIDs and the data value for turning the alert on/off. I can do so from the nRF phone app but it doesn't tell me the data protocol that is actually sent from the app. I assume that the UUID needs to be sent as hex data, not a string, but nothing I've tried so far works. If the phone app can do it, then I would think that I can do it manually as well. Any ideas?
I'm really having trouble connecting to my ESP8266. I was working with this setup for long time now and I didn't have to flash my boards. Now after having to use a different wifi i needed to flash the board. After doing the following
Updating to the newest ConfigurableFirmata
Using FirmataBuilder to download fitting firmata
Uploading the Firmata to the ESP8266
I can't connect via Johnny-Five anymore (getting the usual timeout error). I couldn't narrow down what it exaclty is (and I have been trying all day) but these are things that I have noticed (Using ConfigurableFirmata directly as well as using firmatabuilder and StandardWifiFirmata, all with the same behaviour)
an open Hotspot gets created even though I'm in Client Mode
when scanning for ports I do find the Module connected to my Wifi (Serial Monitor in Debug tells me the same too) but no open port is found, even though it's specified in the firmata.
I just can't narrow down the reason. I hope you guys can.
OK,
this was a simple user mistake. But since I lost a whole day searching for the error and I think others might too, I'll share my mistake here.
As I pointed out I created the Firmata as Client (thinking its a client to my Hotspot). But you will have to create it as a server (as you want to connect to the board)
It's as simple as that. If you are on http://firmatabuilder.com/ make sure you choose TCP Server if you want to connect to your board.
I'm working on an Arduino Uno + ESP8266 project.
I try to use them as a web server on Wi-Fi network to control a motor that connects to Arduino - basically a trigger system that receives signals via Wi-Fi. Currently, I've successfully connected ESP8266 to my access point by sending AT commands from Arduino. Another client on the same network can statically access ESP8266's assigned IP address.
However, when I try to catch some HTTP queries (I want to use them as conditions to control the motor) I occasionally encountered the non-ASCII characters in HTTP request. I use serial comm to debug, please look at the screenshot in the link below:
Arduino - Computer serial communication for debugging
The line ",519:POST ..." should contain a complete number following "/?", but there's some strange characters instead. So I cannot determine the input data to control motor. Once in a blue moon, the expected format of request shows up as follows:
The correct data received
There's no issue with the HTTP response part, even though I got the uninterpretable request, I can still send the JSON error message back to client.
Attempt Note:
The Arduino uses different serial ports to talk to computer and ESP8266. Since the connection can be established, and the data being sent, I believe that the baud rate is simply correct on both side. (115200 for ESP8266, 9600 for computer - also tried 115200 for both and got the same result)
I use V3.3 from Arduino as power source for ESP8266. But I also use voltage regulator to smooth out the current as many people suggest that. The problem still remains.
I'm struggled with this issue for a few days, just want to know if anybody had the similar experience, or could give some clue for the next step.
After a considerable effort to stabilize the circuit, I switched to NodeMCU and got the system working perfectly. I assume that ESP8266 alone is somehow not robust enough without other components, which I unfortunately have no knowledge on.
So I'd like to close this thread with a short recommendation for anybody struggling with the same issue to switch to NodeMCU (which would replace both Arduino and ESP8266); if that could support the requirement.